


In Return

by Siria



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Community: picfor1000, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-05
Updated: 2012-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-28 23:17:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/313260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has long since become expert at hiding in plain sight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Return

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2012 [A Picture is Worth 1000 Words](http://picfor1000.livejournal.com/) challenge, prompted by [this picture](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/2058592656/in/photostream/). Thanks to dogeared for betaing!

[  
](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/2058592656/in/photostream/)

Natasha waits for the tram to go by—a shuddering red and yellow mass, its brakes giving off a dying metal shriek as it ponderously rounds the corner—before she continues across the street. The asphalt beneath the soles of her boots is cracked, grit crunching with each step she takes; the clean spring bite of the air is sullied by exhaust fumes. Around her, the streets are busy, Friday evening and the cool wind pushing people homewards. Natasha doesn’t feel the cold as most people, but she matches her pace to the civil servants and factory workers around her anyway; their desire to get home helps to disguise the purpose of her own steps. She doesn’t think she’s being followed, but caution never hurts. Natasha has long since become expert at hiding in plain sight.

To the left, then to the right. As she walks, Natasha hears snippets of conversation—greetings and farewells, discussions of the best place to buy sturdy walking shoes and why Gennady’s been in such a good mood lately—in the blur of Russian and Ukrainian which is the local dialect. A woman emerges from a storefront, arms loaded with shopping bags, her attention distracted by two petulant children; she almost collides with Natasha, sighs out an apology which has definite undertones of _this was the last thing I needed today_. Natasha smiles back, tells her not to worry, there was no harm done, and it’s only muscle-deep habit which keeps her smile from wavering when she hears herself speak Russian, hears the slight skew to her vowels which are the legacy of six years away and Natalie Rushman’s claimed East Coast origins.

If the woman notices, she says nothing; continues on down the street saying _Pavel! Pavel, don’t tease your sister like that_! Natasha carries on her way, too, but can’t quite shake that feeling of being unmoored by her own words. Kharkiv is almost a thousand kilometres west of where she was born; she hadn’t expected to feel at home here, to walk streets that feel familiar despite decades away. Still, there’s a difference between knowing that you’re not at home and feeling yourself to be foreign, and she hadn’t thought she would be summarily confronted with the realisation that, in so many small ways, she’s no longer the woman Nick Fury recruited.

Her destination is at the end of a long row of identical, Stalinist-era apartment buildings. It’s clearly years since they’ve been painted, and the humid summers and icy winters have caused the plaster to crumble away around some of the window frames. Natasha double-checks the address against the one which Stark had sent to her phone and then walks up six flights of stairs to the first apartment on the left. The stairwell is utilitarian and smells of cheap bleach, painfully clean in the manner of working-class neighbourhoods where people are mindful of what little they do possess.

She inhales and exhales deeply once, twice, before she knocks on the door—not because the climb has winded her, but to help ground her, in case she is greeted with a fist or a bullet and needs to move without conscious thought. When the door opens, Natasha sees both fight and flight in the dilation of his pupils, his clenched fists, but after a second or two, he just sighs heavily and turns away from her, back into the apartment’s tiny living room. The muted television is showing a soccer game, and he slumps back down on the sofa in front of it. “They sent you alone, huh? The news programmes, they make it seem like you don’t go anywhere without the green one and the capitalist anymore. But I suppose you always did like to work alone.”

“No,” Natasha says. “I didn’t.” She hasn’t left the open doorway. She doesn’t fear him, but there is something about boundary lines that’s always appealed.

His gaze flickers towards her for a moment and then he laughs—the booming, hearty laugh that always seemed so incongruous coming from a man that slender. “I knew there was a reason you were my favourite.”

“No,” Natasha says, “I wasn’t.”

Something shifts in his expression, sharp and bitter. His hands, gnarled with age and with what his medical records indicate is severe rheumatoid arthritis, clench convulsively in his lap. “Well,” he says, sitting up straighter. “Make it quick, then.”

Natasha allows herself to smile. “I’m not here to kill you,” she says, “I brought you something. You can consider it a gift, if you want.” From the pocket inside her leather jacket, she produces the USB drive Bruce gave her. She walks into the room then, places it precisely in the centre of the battered coffee table.

He stares at it with wide eyes, as if it’s a bomb primed to explode. “A… gift?”

“Sarcasm,” Natasha says. “These files document what you did, and what happened to those of us who survived. A copy of them will arrive at FSB headquarters tomorrow. ‘Here is information’,” she says, repeating his old training motto, mimicking the cadences of his voice, “‘do with it what you will.’”

She turns and leaves without looking back. There is little need; she is no longer twenty-two, and even if he were still a general, the power he had over her is long gone. Outside, it’s raining—fat, heavy drops that plaster her curls to her scalp and make her turn up the collar of her jacket. Natasha walks back in the direction from which she came—to the left, to the right—along streets which have been emptied by the weather and by the gathering dusk. This time, there is nothing to make her falter; the worst reminder of her past has been left behind, held in two trembling, aging hands. She is breathing more easily, in a way that has nothing to do with how fast she’s walking; it is, she realises, because she has not come unmoored—she’s come free.


End file.
